But he’d heard the change. He said to himself: Is this what’s called the well-known Freudian slip? Is this then the whole story? Friendship?
Later she said: Friendship is a truly precious thing. If only you knew it.
Later, in the anguish of his agitated torments, he said to himself: This is foolish, useless. Ours is a mere cycle in a series of relations, friendships, affections, and infatuations. So what? I am to blame, of course. First by rejecting, then by entering into a game with rules I did not abide by, followed necessarily by failure. Then I raised the issue to metaphysical levels that have nothing to do with anything. Then I abided too by the social norms and counseled commitment to them. Shouldn’t I have entered into the game as it should have been played? The commitments and conventions are matters one can implicitly subvert without confronting, without challenging, without admitting. Furthermore, I lacked shrewdness, experience, and begrudged time—this is also a kind of self-sparing and constriction. Add to all this my regression when facing images of ruin and destruction. Gambling at the price of total loss is also one of the rules of the game. Why acknowledge defeat before even entering the arena? Wasn’t all this abiding by the rules of the common, bare, shabby, pleasant game, exactly what was required? Wasn’t there in the game a diversion and distraction of sorts anyhow? Wasn’t it necessary to have at least a measure of initiative, intelligence, generosity, and discretion? And tolerance too?
He said to her: Not on the bread of dreams does man live, but rather, with it he dies.
He said to himself: Man? What arrogance! Not on the bread of dreams do I live myself. That is all. In fact, with it I neither live nor die.
The salon was cozy: its chair cushions soft, submerged in quasi-sexual repose beneath their seated bodies; the arms of the chairs returning to their elbows a gratifying sense of firm relation to the rest of the body. The walls were inlaid with sculpted marble, with wrought iron that formed flowers in relief, complete with taut slender branches. In the larger, ornamental fish tank, black speckled carp, mischievous looking, passed among wild, flourishing water-plants. There was also an archaeological column of old marble perforating the ceiling, around which the walls and staircase had been carefully erected. As for the old crystal chandeliers, they illumined from on high, dazzling and distant.
They asked for Campari. The elegant waiter with shiny hair brought the red liquid in crystal glasses, the ice cubes gently shaking and carrying melted tangled fluid-threads of deep red.
He had entered to find her with the Finn, the same man who had met them at lunch. His thick, light blond hair reached his shoulders. His colored shirt seemed expensive. His face did not have the bland complexion of northerners; it was full, slightly rosy from a previously ordered Campari, or from heat, or from his persistent project of flirting. His eyes, which had a clever, blue glow, seemed narrow in his broad, heavy face. They had some sort of insolence and indifference, yet managed to focus sufficiently on his discreet courting, which she was encouraging—or at least not discouraging—by the way she sat with her skirt up, revealing in the light her upper thighs’ soft bronze. She had thrown away her shoe, one of the pair; her toes—short, plump and pressed to each other—were painted dark red and kept on plunging up and down into the thick fabric of the carpet.
Mikhail looked at the familiar little drama. He was not interested, but felt somewhat hard pressed nonetheless, wanting to come out of this situation, in some way, rather successfully. He didn’t know Rama, not really, nor did he care about what adventure—whether one kind or another—she thought to delve into. Their stroll in the city until the dawn that morning had confirmed friendship and pleasant collegiality—not more in truth, but no less either. That was why he could not immediately excuse himself and depart before an appropriate time had passed, whatever the measure of propriety was. Anyhow, he couldn’t know the measure.
He noticed the Campari had given her face a rosy flush. Inasmuch as he was in the end an easterner and a southern Egyptian, he felt that he had an obligation—which no one had assigned to him—to take care of her, even if from afar.
The Finn said: I am captivated by stories of Egyptians. The pyramids, what are they? Aren’t the Egyptians the ones who consider cows sacred?
Mikhail did not answer. He found Europeans—educated or uneducated—somewhat boring. He didn’t feel the need to deliver a lecture, to meet a challenge, or present an apology.
He said to himself: Finn, your world is not mine, even if its contours match mine exactly.
He said to himself: But what is my world?
Rama said: Mr. Qaldas here is the best person to tell you the story. The ancient Egyptians were his direct ancestors.
She was enjoying the entire situation. Mikhail was angered a little. It was not his intention to sally forth upon a venture or to win any prize. He always felt above this competition to appeal to a woman, as if he thought the prize was his right, a priori, and his cause was taken for granted. Or else he would give up at the beginning through abstinence or by conceit, choosing for himself total defeat, though treating it like a victory upside down.
Mikhail said to her, talking in English so the foreigner would hear: True, yet no one has any direct ancestors. We also have a strand of the old Greeks, and possibly of the Romans. Of the latter I am not sure. Probably not. The Romans were soldiers and masters. One thing is sure, we do not have Arab blood in our veins.
She said: What about Arab civilization and Arabic language? Don’t they transform the very make-up of men and reformulate them?
Glowing, he said: Yes, the civilization and the language mingled with our blood. But even so, I am not so sure about their effects. Certainly their language penetrated; as far as their civilization is concerned, that is another story. I have forgotten my language or I have let go of it. Besides, my infatuation with Arabic is a kind of traitors’ infatuation—ambivalent, like the infatuation of one with his strangler. But it has become my language, mine and yours, our language. You and I spoke in the language of our ancestors when we first spoke. This much you know, don’t you? We still speak a sacred language of sorts, a hieroglyphics under a different wrap perhaps, beneath a new mask. This is the magic of Egyptians: they transform everything, literally everything, to their own special gold, their own special soil, their own special form. This seems to me primitive and naive, but I am sure of it. I have faith that needs neither proof nor evidence. It’s somewhat mystical.
She said: As for me, family stories relate that we came from Spain, crossed the Delta and mixed with the Bedouin of Sharqiya. I am thus a hybrid, as you see.
He said: You are hundred percent Egyptian, no matter what you claim. No one has this face but an Egyptian. Isis too came to Sharqiya.
She laughed swiftly and quietly, but Mikhail had become excited by the provocation.
He said: Our blood in Egypt is always the stronger. I am not a racist and I do not adhere to the supremacy of a race over others. But I do insist on the uniqueness of Egypt which you call hybrid, and I call a melting pot, one of its kind, because of the purity of its flames and the strength of its fire. Even the ancient Egyptian gods are the saints of yesteryear and the holy figures of today. Our people, whatever faith they belong to, find a depth, sense, and significance in religion that no other people does. Horus might be called Mar Girgis or Sayyidna al-Husayn. Isis has many names living among us in every home in Egypt until today, tomorrow, forever and ever.
Rama lifted her shoeless leg, as if unawares, and put it on the luxurious seat under the other thigh in a comfortable position, revealing the lower part of her thigh with its pleasantly suggestive folds.
The Finn had been isolated from the unfolding discourse, even though he was passionately following it, trying to understand these two Egyptians. It was obvious from his face that he was getting confused. He said:
Isis? Isn’t she the goddess of love who came out of the sea in an open seashell?
Rama said with a touch of both sarcasm and affectio
n: No, you mean Aphrodite. I think Isis too was a goddess of love. Should we ask Mr. Qaldas to explain it to us?
The Finn asked with naïveté and cunning: Do you know her story?
Mikhail said: I have, of course, forgotten the details.
Rama said: Please, Mikhail, tell us.
He lit a cigarette then redressed himself and offered the Finn a cigarette, which he declined, and offered another to Rama which she accepted. He lit it for her. She put her hand on his, circling the tiny flame, drawing in the smoke through her rounded lips with pleasure. The elegant waiter was passing by with the tail of his black jacket swaying in a graceful rhythm, cognac glasses in his hands. She was settling down in her seated position, one leg without a shoe under her thigh as if she were sitting on an Istanbuli couch.
He said: Yes, Isis, the ancient, the first and forever goddess of love; the virgin, the mother of Horus, the mother of Christ, our chaste Lady; Astarte, Persephone, Hera, Demeter, Aphrodite, multiple Marys; the multicolored, receiving, fertile, immortal essence.
The Finn asked: But how? What happened?
Mikhail had forgotten the story. It seemed to him that he would not know how to narrate it, but he wanted to. By the second glass of Campari he was narrating it as if it were a family story that he had heard from his grandmother, or had read in the yellowed papers in one of the drawers of the marble desk in the hallway of their house when he was a boy probing into family documents hidden under receipts, bills, and photographs of faded colors, along with the heavy, large Bible with its black leather cover.
Bereaved Isis, with her hair down, had gathered all the torn-off parts of Osiris, the martyr; she gathered everything except his phallus. If she could not find it, drought and death would befall the brown, fertile land of Kemi, the gentle, warm heart of the world, but blocked in its left ventricle. The box, bed, coffin made to the size of the great god and on which melting lead was poured is in Qift, the city of dispossession and mourning. It has been carried by the scanty waters of the Nile coming up from the vales of the nether world, lit by an inextinguishable sun, sending it to the Mediterranean Sea. The unruly khamsin is deranged. The loathed storm of dryness and fine sand eclipses the moon, blackens the face of the sun. The first Cain with his violent animal force is the descendant of the ancient, gigantic prince of darkness, the ally of the black queen of Ethiopia. Here is winged Isis fluttering on the massive leaden shell. She is the millenary phoenix; from her wings waft the perfume of seasoning, the fragrance of spices exhaling ambergris and astonishing balm. Her two wings are spread-out sails on the face of the sea waves, legislating life and death. She is the goddess of land, sea, and sky; the protector of ships until the waves throw them upon the heart of the stump of the old Phoenician cedar tree, a column’s pedestal in the house of the king of Byblos. Thus a tree grows on it again, flourishes and surrounds him with its invincible body, protecting him from oppression, dryness, and dearth of soul. Isis is the sister and beloved of Osiris; they loved each other before they were born, and they were married when they were in the womb of their mother. Osiris with innumerable eyes, the Light of the World, the imprisoned Light, born on the first day of Genesis, living until the ninth and final day that has no end. I still see him; no food for him except a head of onion and the green stalk of the fern at dawn, with the wounded head wrapped by the large handkerchief whose greenness has faded from ancient dust. Music, skills, plants, and laws are imprisoned with him in his leaden floating grave. As for Isis, she nurses the son of the king of Byblos with her finger in his mouth. She places the little prince every night into a celebration of baptism by raging fire, conquering death and bringing him into the hallways of immortals. The queen mother loses her mind as she sees the blazing fire consuming the body of her son. Then Isis, the divine enchantress, reveals her glory. She splits open the ancient cedar, which pronounces the secret in clear tongue, and she hands her dear charge to the Egyptian, she who always brings plentiful good after the drought. I still see the prolific tender cow with udders that will never dry up, with her elevated haunches in her full black jallabiya, carrying her earthenware jar on her head, svelte, her figure undulating amid the fields suckling a thousand thousand Horuses endlessly with the milk of pride that does not ebb despite the famine of times. The dark land under the mud of the valley with cracked shores flooded by water turns into the giving, eternally youthful body of Osiris. The sun springs out from the lotus flower and the black bull Apis is continuously renewed, having glowing skin. The fertile moon rays have parted, revealing Horus, the falcon. He will be brought up and he will defeat the scorpion armies in the exile of eastern swamps among frail reed stalks, with the power of his mother’s all-potent amulets. He will grow up and stab the vicious hippopotamus and distribute its meat to the dispossessed. He has thus avenged his torn-up father, great martyr buried in Busiris. Each part of his dismembered, most holy body is a mausoleum and a shrine along the canals, the waterways, and the banks of the Nile, now, as it were, ruler of the kingdom of the living dead, in his white attire and handsome ebony face, open-eyed forever and ever, maintaining justice by the scale of Ma’at, and next to him the monster ‘Am‘am, the god of retribution who gnaws at the hearts of unrepentant sinners.
He emptied his glass. When he went back to his room, his estrangement was not painful.
Isis is not one of those ancient myths, but on some level living and present in his life, permitting neither denial nor confirmation of his acceptance of her or, should he rather say, his belief in her? His is an elemental conviction, not a matter for questioning or answering. It is a given, a condition—for that which amounts to more than his own existence and comes before his existence.
Shaken by the telephone’s ring, he rushes and lifts the receiver, made anxious by the surprise. He hears her voice: Can you come down now? Confused, he answers thoughtlessly: Now? What time is it? She says: What does it matter what time it is? Are you busy? He says with hesitation: Not at all. She says slyly and tenderly: I am seeking you to save me from a critical situation. He says: A critical situation? His thoughtlessness lingers. She laughs: Our friend Peter.
He was perplexed a little, then he said: Ah the Finn. What about him? He felt himself becoming a bit hotheaded. She says: He persists on calling me, inviting me to go out now to see the Church of St. Peter, saying it is beautiful at night.
He says: A church after midnight? She says: Indeed! He says it’s the church of his namesake and patron and that it’s open all night.
He says: And you want to skip out? She says: Exactly! Can you be ready in ten minutes? He says: In two, the time it takes to get to you.
He had the sensation of southern Egyptian gallantry and the joy of a small adventure. She said: Then right away. I’ll wait for you at the front door, outside in the street.
They went into the magical night city, rediscovering it, recreating it.
Centuries-old marble stairways and squares: buildings with dim doors, old fences, fountains with water smoothing with its constant fall the sides of the stony bodies with their handsome muscles bursting with blocked vigor, the doors of small restaurants with old-fashioned lanterns and elongated classic windows with curtains drawn and the hyacinth bean trees strangely green in the artificial light in the small square.
Later, he said: Thus was the beginning—long, joyful, and innocent, not knowing it was the beginning.
What happened was neither in the past nor in the future, but carried by the moment’s lightness—delicate as down from a sparrow’s feathers blown by the lit nocturnal breeze, whose light is equally distributed, neither keen nor blunt, across the quiet walls, buildings, and across a sky without depth.
He said: Even the meaning of what happened is a matter of inquiry. I mean, simply what happened on the physical, concrete, sensual level, without search for motivation, cause, or goal. Simply, what happened is alone real. As for its meaning, who can know?
She had said to him: I loathe self-pity. I loathe betraying a trust. I loathe
incompetence.
He said: Your truth has a thousand colors, but it is your own.
She said, looking mysteriously as if scrutinizing an uncharted land: You are worried and not sure. There is nothing strange in this. In such cases this is the nature of things.
She did not continue what she was about to say.
No matter how much you say to yourself that the seed of truth in your fantasies is fertile, impregnating the future, you will never be cured of your bad dream. My days and dreams are weighed by the wine of your name—Rama, Rama—radiating with the dark glow of my never ebbing yearning for you. Your name has become once more a magical incantation. Do you—he spoke now to himself—want to hold the sun in your palms and embrace the wind? No, you don’t know how to say it. Your language is neither correct nor precise.
Rama, you are in truth the image of all things that shine in the heart. You come, bidding to your lovers in dream, and they cannot ignore you. You are the desired, the holy of world holies. But the world is not holy; it is polluted. The Nile waters come to you from the nether world and flow up to your chest, making the rocks mellow, and this according to your will, you the seer, the woman with the crescent necklace, lunar earrings, and silver python bracelet.
She said to him: You call yourself a man of ethics, puritan and upright.
He said: No.
He said: The lie, the intoxicating and common ambiance of the lie. Whatever dragged me to this stifling ambiance, I the “ethical man”?
He bought her a doll. The doll’s eyes were green and in its face were the same roundness and softness as Rama’s. Its dress was full in its miniature measure, made of red velvet, a deep, warm, heavy burgundy. At its waist it had a yellow ribbon decorated very elegantly with fringes at its ends. The doll’s short arms were stretched in front of it, powerless in a frozen gesture that utterly fails to reach the embrace it seeks and desires; its shoes soft and extremely well made triggered a sense of tenderness. Rama was delighted with it. She held it to her big bosom as if the doll was closer to her than her own daughter, and said: Oh, how beautiful! How small her mouth is! She patted the soft yellow hair made of tightly woven nylon threads that momentarily deceived the eye and the heart, calling for a gentle touch.
Rama and the Dragon Page 16
